Purchasing Facts for Truck Weigh Scales

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Monthly Archives: April 2015

We mention it all the time on this website but a truck scale is a major investment and anytime you invest in something like that you want to make certain that you protect your investment. One key area of importance is where you locate the scale on your property and the scale foundation.

Producing over one million tons of product per year is an impressive feat for any industry. At Giant Cement in Harleyville, S.C., this annual quantity reflects the effective strategies implemented throughout their lean manufacturing process. Producing and transporting this amount of cement requires a devoted workforce and equipment that never stops. The 24/7 demands can take its toll on equipment and installing durable scales is integral to keep product moving. Giant Cement requires the most durable truck and rail scales to handle its high volume of trucks per day and constant stream of rail cars. They turned to Rice Lake’s SR truck scale and a custom-designed railroad scale to meet their needs.

An existing competitor’s truck scale still resides on its original installation site, inhabiting low ground on the lot and providing a reminder that proper installation is an essential ingredient for optimal weighments. Because of its location, every rainfall washed any nearby debris beneath the scale and would often create pools of standing water. “That scale was a maintenance nightmare,” explains Brad Locker, Industrial Controls Engineer for Giant Cement. “It seemed like we were always calling someone out here to make adjustments or clean the foundation.”

Just about every business is looking for ways to make their business more efficient and to save money. One easy way to do that is to research and plan ahead when it comes to things like locating a truck scale on your property. By putting a scale in a certain location it can increase uptime and profitability as opposed to leading to more service calls, increased cleaning times and increased down time.

Often end users will ask about adding a printer to their existing scale or perhaps to a new system they are requesting. And quite often the end user is under the impression that adding a printer to a scale is as simple as going to the electronics store and buying a computer printer and plugging it into the scale via USB. Unfortunately, adding a printer to a scale system is not usually a plug and play application.

So to answer the question, why is my label or ticket printer not working with my indicator? Let’s take a look at the answer provided by Cardinal Scale. Label printers come from the factory set in a graphics mode (called page mode) while Cardinal indicators send data in a line mode from the print tab setup. It is often possible to set the label printers to line mode, but this can be difficult and is ultimately the less effective option. We recommend creating a graphic-type ticket using Cardinal’s nControl software that can be used to create custom headers and set font sizes. This has been proven to work well with the label printers that Cardinal sells. Works great when designing print outs for indicators such as the 190, 205, 210, or 225.